The No-O, No-D Cavs

The Cleveland Cavaliers lost their 21st straight game to ex-Cav LeBron James and his Miami Heat on Monday, 117-90. Now the Cavs are two games away from tying the record for longest losing streak in a season — 23 games, by Vancouver in 1996 and the Denver Nuggets two seasons later. And they are three games shy of the longest losing streak overall, set by the Cavs themselves over the end of the 1981-82 season and start of the next season. Things have gotten worse since the Lakers routed Cleveland last month. The Cavs had lost five of their eight prior games by single-digit margins. Since that rout eight of 10 losses have been by 13 points or more.

There have been some wretched Cavs teams in franchise history, which spans 41 seasons without a title. But that 1982-83 season stood out as the worst since the ABA-NBA merger, as the Cavs won fewer than 20% of their games for the only time in that span. It was also the only time that Cleveland finished in the bottom five in the league in both offense and defense, as measured by offensive rating and defensive rating: points scored and yielded per 100 possessions. Both those marks are under threat this season. Cleveland is on pace for 14 wins, one fewer than in 1982-83, and it ranks last in both offensive and defensive rating in the NBA. If it holds up those marks until the end of the year, it will become the first team to rank last in offense and defense since Dallas finished 11-71 in 1992-93. Only one other team has ranked last in both categories: the 12-70 Clippers in 1986-87.

It’s not even all that common to finish in the bottom five in the league in both offense and defense: Fewer than one and a half teams have done it each year, on average, since the merger. Despite all the truly awful teams in league history, relatively few have managed to be terrible simultaneously at scoring and preventing scoring. And it’s become more rare as the league has expanded and ranking in the bottom five in anything becomes more difficult. An average of just one team per season has ranked in bottom five in both in the prior nine years, and this season, only Cleveland is on pace to do so. Cleveland also is on pace to become the first team to score fewer than 100 points per 100 possessions in six years, and the first to score that few while yielding more than 110 per 100 possessions since those 1992-93 Mavs.

While Cleveland has lost some players to injury, their biggest loss was James in the offseason. During his seven years with the team, Cleveland averaged a rank of 13th in the league in offense among 30 teams (or 29 in LeBron’s rookie year) and 10th in defense. In the four prior years, Cleveland averaged rankings of 23rd and 22nd, respectively, of 29. And this year it’s 30th of 30 in both.

Defense is hard to quantify, but the offensive impact of losing LeBron James is clear. Shots he used to take are falling to other players who are finding themselves less likely to be open and less capable of carrying the team. All eight players who got significant playing time last year and this year for the Cavs have seen a drop of true shooting percentage (points scored per possession used with a shot, divided by two). The average decline is eight percentage points, which would translate to a drop of 16 points per 100 possessions. Cleveland’s decline hasn’t really been that precipitous, in part because the worst shooters aren’t getting as many shots — the Cavs are scoring 12.6 fewer points per 100 possessions than last season. But the team’s effective field goal percentage, a shooting percentage adjusted for three-point shots, has dropped by seven percentage points, an indication of how much the offense has suffered without James at its center. This is merely a quick-and-dirty analysis, but — in the spirit of Nate Silver’s recent defense of Carmelo Anthony — it shows that a superstar is very hard to replace, even with strongly worded, strangely formatted letters.

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